Resolving Arnold - Part 2: Guess Again

by Martin Kottmeyer

One problem that stands out in any attempt to make the Arnold
case a True-UFO is the drawing in the Air Force files. The shape of the object in the top
view is roughly similar to a shoe heel. Not only is it not round as all good flying
saucers ought to be, it is for most practical purposes unique. Only one or two other cases
even come close -- the 1947 Rhodes photo and perhaps the 1993 backdated recollections of
Frank Kaufman concerning Roswell. The distinctiveness calls into question whether it
should be considered part of the UFO phenomenon at all.

J. Allen Hynek also offered an
argument which should be addressed here since it is repeated by both critics and
proponents of the case unaware it is partially erroneous. Hynek asserts that the eye
cannot resolve objects that subtend an angle appreciably less than 3 minutes of arc. If we
accept that Arnold was right in saying the objects were 25 miles away and that each
object's length was 20 times its width, then a bit of trigonometry would put their size as
2000 feet in length. This being between a third and a half mile, it is simply too bloody
huge to believe. Such a titan-size fleet would blot out the sun and a fair portion of sky
to people beneath its flight path. How could only one person 25 miles away see this and
everybody closer in miss it?

For those readers who dont know the Arnold story, heres how it first
appeared from the Associated Press:

PENDELTON, Ore., June 25 (AP) -- Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at
"incredible speed" at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth
Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were.

Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee engaged in searching for a missing
plane, said he sighted the mysterious objects yesterday at 3 P.M. They were flying between
Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington state, he said, and appeared to weave in and
out of formation. Arnold said he clocked and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles an hour.

As Martin Kottmeyer has related to us in an earlier article ("The Saucer
Error," May, 1993, V. 1, #4), the news release actually got it wrong; the objects
were not saucer-shaped, but rather Arnold had said the objects "flew erratic, like a
saucer if you skip it across the water." He said the objects "were not
circular," but the reporter apparently misunderstood and thus arose the term,
"flying saucer."

This is the drawing of Arnold's
objects from the original report in the Air Force files. Source: Brad Steiger, Project
Blue Book, Ballantine, 1976.

Hynek then takes a different tack. Accept the 25 miles for distance and accept Arnold's
45-50 estimate of length and the subtended angle is about 80 seconds (1 minute, 20
seconds) of arc and that is below the third minute resolution limit. Hynek understood that
to be impossible.23 That judgment was too severe. Texts I have consulted
generally put the limit of visual acuity at around 1 minute of arc. With increases of
luminosity even that limit lowers.24 Since Arnold's sighting happened in full
daylight and the objects were highly reflective by his own account, the conditions for
resolution were optimal. It is perhaps worth adding that there are different types of
visual acuity which can make it possible for the eye to detect wires as fine as 1/100
minute of arc. Deciding which form of acuity is applicable in this real-world situation
isn't automatic. The detail of the report involving Arnold seeing the objects silhouetted
against a snow suggests a practical analogy to the question of the limits of acuity in
sunspot watching. In that situation, science shows the average person can detect sunspots
as small as 27 seconds (roughly ½ minute), of arc. Hynek's calculation of 80 seconds thus
would not be sufficient grounds for rejection of Arnold's report.

It seems only fair to add that Arnold offered another measure of the objects, sizes
worth pondering. He compared the angular size to the span between the engines of that
passing DC-4 noted earlier which Arnold estimated as 15 miles distant. This gives a visual
span of 2' 40", which is still better in terms of resolution plausibility while still
being in the ballpark of being consistent with the other set of figures. They are still
both tiny images, but not impossibly tiny. While this strengthens the credibility of
Arnold as an observer and allows a more believable size to the objects to be assumed if
the 25 miles distance is accepted, the paradox of the single observer status of the case
stays relatively intact. We are still dealing with a five mile long chain of objects
swooping past a national landmark in broad daylight at speeds in excess of 1,200 m.p.h.
People closer in had to have taken notice of such a spectacle. If nothing else, the
cascade of sonic booms generated by supersonic craft would be impossible to ignore even if
everyone's attention was riveted elsewhere. Before we bestow the label of True-UFO to
Arnold's objects, a serious search for an alternative must be done.

The absence of a large population of corroborative witnesses near Mount Rainier seems
sufficient grounds for wondering if the event was much more localized than Arnold
surmised. A critical look at the distance estimate is both warranted and necessary. One
must almost certainly accept the objects passed in front of Mount Rainier's snow field as
Arnold claimed. The angular velocity of the objects indicated by Arnold's clocking of the
objects between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams is .8 degrees per second. At that speed it
would take nine seconds to cross the face of Mount Rainier at the 9,200 foot level
indicated by Arnold's report. This is too long for a spurious observation related the
fleetingness of the phenomenon. This would rule out explanations based on distant sky
phenomena like a train of meteors, Campbellian mirages, or density-shifting space animals.

What of distances closer than Mount Rainier's vicinity? It has been pointed out that
Arnold spoke of the objects having "swerved in and out of the high mountain
peaks." This would seem to put a lower limit to the distance if one could first
determine which peaks they swung around and if they were broad enough to have a transit
time to regard the observation as secure. Arnold was slightly more specific in later
recountings of the event. In The Coming of the Saucers he said they momentarily
disappeared "behind a jagged peak that juts out from Mount Rainier proper."25
In his memoir for the First International UFO Congress he says, "When they turned
length-wise or flat-wise to me they were very thin and they actually disappeared from
sight behind a projection on Mount Rainier in the snowfield."26 These are
not exactly the same thing, but they give a fair indication of what to look for on the
geological survey maps.

Arnold estimated the crafts were at an altitude of 9,200 feet plus or minus 1,000. The
task at hand is thus to locate some feature extending above the 8,200 foot level. This
yields a neat little surprise. There are no such peaks between Mount Rainier and Mount
Adams. The closest thing I could find was Pyramid Peak which stands only 6,937 feet tall
in front of Mount Rainier's base. There is a sharp little projection called Little Tacoma
which sticks out around the 10,000 foot level, but it is on the wrong side of the mountain
to be seen from Arnold's flight path. It would be badly stretching things to suggest he
got either his position or altitude that far wrong.

Normally one prefers early accounts to later ones, but the Congress memoir may provide
the clue to what happened here. When the object turned flatwise, the optical thickness
likely dropped below the ½ minute resolution limit and briefly dropped from sight. The
rough surface of the mountain provided opportunities for an illusory correlation of the
disappearance to some feature of the mountain. The disappearance seemed to be caused by an
intervening feature where none in fact existed. With no firm lower distance estimate, the
way is opened for the objects being closer to Arnold than he had surmised.

Return to Arnold's report:
"They flew like many times I have observed geese to fly in a rather diagonal
chain-like line as if they were linked together." That is what they certainly seem
like. Geese do fly in chains. A number of nine makes sense. The arrangement of the leader
being higher than the others, unlike military formations, is sensible for geese who take
advantage of the downdraft turbulence of others in the formation for easier flying. Geese
chains do undulate like kite tails. They do present a basically flat side profile when
seen edge-on.

From above they have a bilateral symmetry like the heel drawn by Arnold. In his
Congress paper he however emphatically denies this idea," -- but they were not
geese!"

He does not explain the reasoning. If the 25 mile distance estimate is the root of it,
we could simply shake it off. Other objections do suggest themselves however. 9,200 feet
is a bit high for geese to be flying. As an experienced pilot, Arnold surely saw geese too
often to be puzzled by their appearance. He speaks of the brilliant flashes of light
reflected on the objects just before that quoted denial; maybe they were unusual in some
way. The pulsation rate perhaps was subliminally felt to be wrong. Perhaps he felt he
should have been able to see the necks and couldn't. They aren't on the drawing.

Perhaps it was a different type of waterfowl. Swans would clear up most these
objections. They normally migrate at night and birders complain "details of their
flights are seldom observed."27 When flying, it is known they travel
exceptionally as high as 10,000 feet to take advantage of calmer air at that altitude and
Arnold commented on the smoothness of the air he was travelling in at the time. Birds
generally travel higher than their normal textbook rates in mountainous regions. The
geometry of the encounter involves a shallow viewing angle and a flight path running
parallel to the path of the objects -- he turned the plane to get a better look out the
side window -- thus making identification optimally unlikely. An intersecting path or a
higher viewing angle and the flapping wings would have cleared things up. Swans would be
more reflective than geese. They "move deceptively fast."28 The neck
would be slenderer and harder to resolve than geese as the image approaches acuity limits.

Will swans fit the established angular sizes and velocities? Arnold's clocking of the
objects have them passing through an angle of roughly 80 degrees in 102 seconds. The plane
was traveling at about 100 m.p.h., according to Arnolds Congress memoir. Swans
travel roughly 50 m.p.h. Since they were traveling on parallel paths the relative velocity
had to be 50 m.p.h. or 150 m.p.h. In the first situation, the angular velocity means the
swans had to be close to a mile away. At that distance, the torso of swans (about 2-feet
long) would subtend an angle of roughly 100 seconds (1 minute, 40 seconds) which fits in
the ballpark of the observed figures calculated earlier. The situation of the 150 m.p.h.
relative velocity would put the swans 3 times farther away and an angular image down
around 30 seconds and thus doubtful. We can thus say a plausible case can be made for a
fit in at least the first eventuality.

Given the smaller size and velocity, the singlewitness status of the event
falls into place. The DC-4 pilot wouldn't have a prayer of seeing a flock of swans 14
miles away. Ground observers would likely miss swans two miles up. The few that might
notice them might never make the connection they had anything to do with Arnold's
"saucers." If somebody did make the connection, would he overcome the reticence
of saying the guy was that far wrong?

That heel
shape that Arnold drew could stillbe a source of sane objection. Even granting
swans and heels are both bilaterally symmetrical, it is a stretch to call the match
compelling. I suspect there is a different explanation for the heel shape. There was a
plane of the era called a Flying Flapjack, which has a significant resemblance to Arnold's
drawing. It was the fastest naval aircraft of its time. We can safely say Arnold was not
looking at a Flying Flapjack in reality. There weren't nine of them around. They didn't
fly quite so erratically. The relevant officials denied they were in the right place at
the right time. But, they weren't secret.

It had been featured on the cover of Mechanix Illustrated a month before
Arnold's experience. As a pilot, Arnold likely heard of the craft and it influenced his
depiction of the objects on some level of mind. Just as people nowadays "fill
in" perceptions of stars, ad planes, and the like with their knowledge of what
saucers should look like, Arnold may have filled in his perception of waterfowl with
knowledge of what fast planes were then looking like. We know from the Project Blue Book
files that the 1947 Rhodes photo, which, as noted earlier, was one of only two
similarly-shaped UFOs in saucer history, involved a photographer/model-builder who knew of
the Mechanix Illustrated cover and suggested the involvement of Flying Flapjacks in
the ongoing mystery.29

The likelihood of ornithological misinterpretation may be enhanced by an incident that
happened a month after the big event. While en route to Tacoma to investigate the Maury
Island mystery, Kenneth Arnold encountered a cluster of twenty-five brass-colored objects
that looked like ducks, but displayed a terrific rate of speed. "I was a little bit
shocked and excited when I realized they had the same flight characteristics of the large
objects I had observed on June 24," he wrote. They also appeared round to him. He
turned his plane to follow them, but they disappeared to the east at a speed far in excess
of his airplane. He concluded, "I know they were not ducks because ducks don't fly
that fast." Maybe so, but he later learned that several farmers in the vicinity
"observed what they though was a peculiar cluster of birds that morning." Ted
Bloecher, a historian of the 1947 saucer flap dryly commented, "Understandably,
Arnold did not report this sighting to the newspapers, nor to the Air Force."30

It might be pleaded that this second incident is less relevant than it strikes at first
blush. It may less indicate a proneness to make a certain class of errors than the fact
that Arnold could have been overwrought and desperate to find more proof of what happened
to him in the midst of harsh media and public opinion. Such conditions did not exist
during the first sighting. Yet, the fact remains we do have a troubling repetition under
conditions where independent witnesses exist who put a rather mundane slant on stimuli
Arnold hypes as extraordinary.

One last issue begs to be brought up. Arnold was an experienced pilot and it could be
pointed out that the average pilot would have ignored sufficiently geese-like phenomena
once he was satisfied they did pose a collision threat. If they were the tiny image, so
close to the limits of acuity, that calculations indicate they were, why did Arnold so
over-react? One feature of the case invites notice as a possible psychogenic factor.
Arnold wasn't in the vicinity of Mount Rainier by accident that day. He was searching the
area to locate a large marine transport, a C-46, which had gone down and crashed a month
and a half earlier. The families of the victims had put up a $5,000 cash reward for anyone
who could locate the crash site so the bodies could be recovered. This involvement of a
mass death suggests certain possibilities.

One is that the feat predictably exists that if death visited this place once, it might
well do so again. If Arnold was of a paranoid cast of mind to begin with, such a
consideration could make him keyed up to over-react to the slightest stimulus -- a variant
of a haunted house situation. A second possibility is that Arnold was jazzed up by the
prospect of getting that money, but on another level of mind his superego was aware of the
ghoulish nature of his search. His conscience might have induced twinges of self-loathing
which manifested in fears of supernatural punishment -- the fear of collision initially,
but also manifest in concern the objects were secret weapons. Still later, after the
encounter and the publicity, he feared they could be used to carry atomic bombs and
threaten life on earth.31 Here the psychology of paranoia colors the
emotionality of the event and pushes what was fundamentally trivial into a higher level of
significance. The undercurrent of Cold War tensions modeled on the surprise of the secret
superweapon sprung on Hiroshima a couple years earlier would find in Arnold's paranoia a
seed to grow a new fear for the culture to embrace.

I am hopeful it is not personal conceit that lets me think prior skeptics were wrong in
their solutions and that this is, finally, the correct one. It is simple logic that we
can't all be right and that is assuredly disconcerting if one hopes that skepticism should
lead to a conclusion that reasonable men can consider reliable and consensual. Some
skeptics, I am tempted to warn, were governed by an idee fixe idiosyncratic to
each which led them to apply solutions too repetitively in their work. So far as I can
discern, I have no particular obsession with birds. I feel this solution is painfully
banal and devoid of poetry or grandeur. It just seems to me it fits the most facts with
the fewest loose ends. Only the historical importance of the Kenneth Arnold case makes the
matter of its solution of any interest. Reject it and no larger consequences to our
understanding of the flying saucer phenomenon seems to follow. Accept it and advocates
will say, "So what? We didn't consider it a classic anyways."

Addendum

Bruce Maccabee challenges the single witness character of the Kenneth Arnold classic in
a paper titled TrueUFOs: Fantasy or Reality? He recounts a report by a
prospector named Fred Johnson who saw several objects on the same day around the same time
of the afternoon. Maccabee is impressed by the fact that Johnson was working on Mt. Adams,
which is a reference point in Arnold's report and thus also puts him the same general
locale. The objects were traveling on a southeasterly path which is in general agreement
with Arnolds objects' trajectory. The prospector was working at about the 5,000 foot
level and they flew over at an altitude not too far above him. This is vague, but
consistent with Arnold's 9,200 ± 1,000 foot estimate. He also spoke of their speed as
"greater than anything I ever saw."

There are, however, differences. There seem to be only six or seven objects instead of
nine. Arnold emphasizes he couldn't make out any tail on them in the original Air Force
report and in his UFO Congress memoirhe exclaimed, "I couldnt discern
any tails on them, and I had never seen an aircraft without a tail!" He adds, I kept
looking for their tails." Johnson apparently found them. He reported "an object
in the tail end" that "looked like a big hand of a clock shifting from side to
side." One could ascribe such differences to two or three objects breaking formation
for unknown ends and Johnson possibly being closer to the objects than Arnold. The
corroborative value is however reduced by such assumptions.

Maccabee notes a further feature of Johnson's account that lends it a historical
uniqueness -- a physical effect. While the objects were in view the needle of his compass
waved from side to side. Menzel dismissed this effect as caused by a trembling of the hand
engendered by the excitement of the sighting. Maccabee counters an experienced prospector
would realize his compass would wobble if he didnt hold it steady. This sounds fair
only out of the context of Menzel's discussion. He discounts this observation because
faith in its validity would imply an immense magnetic field, which proponents of the ETH
(Extraterrestrial Hypothesis) had argued was proof of a magnetic drive operated by
extraterrestrials. Menzel believed such a notion was pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Having
encountered talk of magnetic drives in my reading of early ufology, I must agree. It is
far easier to believe the prospector erred than that such a motive mechanism powers alien
aeroforms sightseeing above the earths surface. An alternative psychological
mechanism incidentally could be at work here. The hand might have been making small
movements in synchrony with the swaying clock hand feature being observed by the witness.
This happens below the level of awareness and has been known to some psychologists as the
phenomenon of rhythmic entrainment. It underlies other phenomena like Ouija board
pendulums and subtle body cuing experienced in social interactions.

The number of the objects, as in the Arnold case, would seem to favor an ornithological
explanation of Johnson's visual observations. The swaying clock hand at the tail end
recalls the swaying motion of the stilt-like legs which trail behind certain waterfowl. In
this instance, birds like herons, cranes, storks, or ibis seem plausible. The absence of
prominent flapping or erratic motion is an obvious objection, but gliding flight is
possible with favorable wind conditions, lifting currents along mountain ridges, or a
descending trajectory. Long necks are curled in S-shape in some species which would
subvert identification if they are being seen from rearward angles. The impression of
speed follows from errors in the assumptions regarding size and distance, which are
notoriously fallible

There is another candidate for corroborative witness in Loren Grosss, Charles
Fort, The Fortean Society & Unidentified Flying Objects. Details are very scant. A
member of the Washington State fire service was on lookout at Diamond Gap, just south of
Mount Rainier. At 3 o'clock, the same time of Arnolds sighting, he observed
"flashes in the distance quite high up in the east." Like Arnolds objects
they "seemed to be going in a straight line and made a strange noise, higher pitched
than most airplanes make." Whistling swans sing only in flight and the notes are
loud, striking, and, though varied, can include a high flageolet note. This account is
perilously lacking any information on which to evaluate any kind of interpretation of it.
One warning must be posted to anyone hoping to argue this buttresses the position that
Arnold's objects are True UFOs:why did this guy report hearing a high pitched
noise and not a sonic boom?